The Supreme Court’s Ethics Code Is a Joke. Big Oil Knows That.
What do judicial ethics codes have to do with climate deception? It all comes down to simple math. Every year, the Supreme Court receives many thousands of cert petitions. To grant a writ of certiorari, four of the nine justices must agree to take one of these cases. Given that lower threshold, any time a justice recuses themselves based on conflicts of interest it reduces the likelihood that a case will be heard. In this case, multiple justices have conflicts of interest that should take them out of the running to consider these suits—if such principles matter to the Supreme Court’s Republican majority.
One of these conflicted justices is Amy Coney Barrett. Barrett’s father, Michael Coney, worked for nearly three decades as one of Shell’s top attorneys, during which time he was also a “major participant” in the American Petroleum Institute. Coney was at Shell in 1988, when the company issued a “confidential” report projecting that the continued burning of fossil fuels would cause “fast and dramatic” increases in global temperatures that “could have major social, economic, and political consequences.” He was at Shell a year later, when the company produced another “confidential group planning” document predicting that, if fossil fuels were not phased out, climate change would cause “more violent weather—more storms, more droughts, more deluges” that would create so much chaos that “civilization could prove a fragile thing.” He was still there as Shell began redesigning its own infrastructure to prepare for that “violent weather” the company knew was coming. And Coney remained at Shell over the following decade, while the company played a lead role in Big Oil’s fraudulent campaign to lock us into those nightmare climate scenarios it predicted.
While Boulder’s case does not include Shell as a defendant, most of the other climate deception suits—which the Supreme Court’s ruling, if it chooses to take up Boulder, would invariably affect—absolutely do. Given Coney’s highly relevant role at Shell, it’s entirely possible that he could end up being deposed in these proceedings. So Justice Barrett’s decision in Boulder is essentially a choice about whether to subject her own father to potentially significant embarrassment and reputational harm. Clearly, she has a conflict of interest on this topic. In fact, she is so clearly conflicted that during her time on the Seventh Circuit—when she was actually bound by a code of ethics—she regularly recused from cases involving Shell. And yet, since reaching the Supreme Court—which, unlike every other federal court, is not subject to any binding code of ethics—Barrett has regularly participated in cert conferences on climate deception cases. Because why not? Who’s going to stop her?
